‘Strengthening community from the inside out’: Transformative possibility for climate change resilience and adaptation in Te Awa Kairangi-Hutt City

<p>How do we organise society and adjust our human relationships with the natural environment to adapt to a changing climate? How do we decide to make these adjustments? These questions shape Aotearoa-New Zealand climate change discourse across adaptation research and central and local government policy. A resilience approach to adaptation is one conceptual response that has gained popularity over the past decade. However, some critical geographers argue that the dominant typologies of resilience have been normalised as neoliberal capitalist strategies and positioned as ‘neutral processes’, and that these strategies can perpetuate inequity and unsustainability. Critical geographers therefore suggest focusing on addressing the root causes of inequity and unsustainability through transformative resilience and adaptation. This research builds on critical geography work by exploring how Common Unity Project Aotearoa (CUPA), a charitable trust located in Te Awa Kairangi-Hutt City, is fostering a community that understands and performs transformative possibilities for resilience and adaptation. For community members of CUPA, ethical actions of a community economy, a process of collective learning and an ability to make sustainability accessible contribute to transformative adaptation and resilience. Exploration of these themes provides a grounded example of how communities can adapt to climate change in ways that also seek to transform inequitable and unsustainable capitalist relations with one another and with the natural environment. CUPA’s transformative work poses implications for councils and decision-makers seeking to build resilience and the capacity to adapt in community, offering alternate possibility for discourse, decision-making, participation and engagement. I approach this project as a scholar-activist in recognition that research is a performative, political act. Through a scholar-activist methodology I use participant observation and interviews to gather insight and information. I ground my critical geography lens in care in order to contribute to a knowledge-making around climate change based in possibility and multiplicity, rather than of authority and judgement.</p>

‘Strengthening community from the inside out’: Transformative possibility for climate change resilience and adaptation in Te Awa Kairangi-Hutt City

<p>How do we organise society and adjust our human relationships with the natural environment to adapt to a changing climate? How do we decide to make these adjustments? These questions shape Aotearoa-New Zealand climate change discourse across adaptation research and central and local government policy. A resilience approach to adaptation is one conceptual response that has gained popularity over the past decade. However, some critical geographers argue that the dominant typologies of resilience have been normalised as neoliberal capitalist strategies and positioned as ‘neutral processes’, and that these strategies can perpetuate inequity and unsustainability. Critical geographers therefore suggest focusing on addressing the root causes of inequity and unsustainability through transformative resilience and adaptation. This research builds on critical geography work by exploring how Common Unity Project Aotearoa (CUPA), a charitable trust located in Te Awa Kairangi-Hutt City, is fostering a community that understands and performs transformative possibilities for resilience and adaptation. For community members of CUPA, ethical actions of a community economy, a process of collective learning and an ability to make sustainability accessible contribute to transformative adaptation and resilience. Exploration of these themes provides a grounded example of how communities can adapt to climate change in ways that also seek to transform inequitable and unsustainable capitalist relations with one another and with the natural environment. CUPA’s transformative work poses implications for councils and decision-makers seeking to build resilience and the capacity to adapt in community, offering alternate possibility for discourse, decision-making, participation and engagement. I approach this project as a scholar-activist in recognition that research is a performative, political act. Through a scholar-activist methodology I use participant observation and interviews to gather insight and information. I ground my critical geography lens in care in order to contribute to a knowledge-making around climate change based in possibility and multiplicity, rather than of authority and judgement.</p>

‘No longer will you call me ‘my Ba’al’’: Hosea’s polemic and the semantics of ‘Ba’al’ in 8th century B.C.E. Israel

The anti-Ba’al polemics of Hosea 2.16-18 have typically been interpreted as evidence for the existence of a cult of Ba’al in 8th century B.C.E. Israel. However, research on the semantic range of the term בעל‎ indicates an alternate possibility: within certain sections of Israelite religious culture, בעל‎ had come to be used as an appellative for YHWH. Theophoric and topynomic names from the 8th century B.C.E., both biblical and extra-biblical, point to the fact that בעל‎ was regularly used as a category meaning ‘lord’ or ‘master’ rather than as a proper name referencing the Canaanite storm-god Ba’al-Hadad. Seen in this way, Hosea’s warnings against idolatry do not indicate Israelite worship of a deity believed to be ontologically distinct from YHWH. Rather, they reveal an intra-religious debate about the character of YHWHism itself regarding the extent to which religious language from other traditions ought to be appropriated for a YHWHistic context.

C&RL Spotlight

Stop the world, I want to get off!I am going to preface this month’s Spotlight by saying, it has been a very strange beginning to 2018—you’ve been warned.Recently, I ran across a term that I hadn’t seen before: TEOTWAWKI. At first, I honestly thought it was a reference to some Mesoamerican mythical figure. As an alternate possibility, it struck me that it could have been some new type of online role-playing game.

Wolves, Archaeologists, and the Origin of Dogs

This chapter focuses on archaeological research and its role in explaining the transformation from wolf to dog, addressing why this topic is controversial: the tendency to identify wolf remains found in archaeological sites as evidence of either interlopers or human killing overshadows the alternate possibility of social bonding between humans and wolves. This probably has prevented appreciation of considerable early evidence of relationships between humans and wolves before the latter became sufficiently phenotypically distinct (“doglike”) to be recognized as domestic animals shaped by humans. Some archaeologists do not acknowledge the possibility that humans interacted with and coevolved with wolves for thousands of years without generating significant phenotypic change in either species, and thus early wolves living with or cooperatively hunting with humans probably go unrecognized by scholars looking only at obvious physical changes.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND SUBSISTENCE EXCHANGE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: WAS WESTERN SEA-PURSLANE A CHANNEL ISLAND TRADE GOOD?

A popular model for social evolution in the Santa Barbara Channel region holds that, during times of resource stress, islanders would trade with mainlanders for plant foods in order to supplement island diets. Recently, western sea-purslane (Sesuvium verrucosum) has been suggested as a primary food product involved in this exchange. This report presents new caloric values forSesuvium verrucosumand other plant foods that have been indicated as possible cross-channel trade goods. We argue that western sea-purslane is unlikely to have been a major trade item and suggest an alternate possibility for the presence of sea-purslane seeds in archaeological middens on Santa Cruz Island. While climate change may indeed have impacted social histories in the Channel Region, we argue that current data do not support the transportation of plant foods as having been a major component in this process.

Blind Source Separation of Photoacoustic Depth Profiles into Independent Components

Step-scan photoacoustic spectroscopy is a powerful tool to nondestructively retrieve depth related information from a sample. Through digital signal processing a series of spectra with effectively different modulation frequencies, probing different thermal diffusion lengths within a sample, can be collected simultaneously. For layered samples spectra of the constituent layers can then be obtained by calculating spectra at specific phase angles from the in-phase and quadrature data through phase projection. However, without prior knowledge of the spectra of the constituent layers, this approach can be difficult. In this report we present an alternate possibility for evaluating step scan photoacoustic data, namely independent component analysis (ICA), which allows for “blind separation” of the mixed photoacoustic spectra without prior knowledge of the constituent spectra. Phase projection and ICA are applied to photoacoustic data acquired from a multilayer sample in an attempt to isolate the spectra of the constituent layers. The results for the two methods are comparable, with ICA offering the advantage that no prior information about the pure spectra of the sample layers is needed.

Sensitive high resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP) detrital zircon geochronology provides new evidence for a hidden Neoproterozoic foreland basin to the Grenville Orogen in the eastern Midwest, U.S.A.

A sensitive high resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP) was used in combination with backscattered electron (BSE) and cathodoluminescence (CL) images to determine the age of detrital zircons from sandstones in the Neoproterozoic Middle Run Formation of the eastern Midwest, United States. Eleven samples from seven drill cores of the upper part of the Middle Run Formation contain detrital zircons ranging in age from 1030 to 1982 Ma (84 analyses), with six distinctive modes at 1.96, 1.63, 1.47, 1.34, 1.15, and 1.08 Ga. This indicates that most, but not all, of the zircon at the top of the Middle Run Formation was derived from the Grenville Orogen. The youngest concordant detrital zircon yields a maximum age of 1048 ± 22 Ma for the Middle Run Formation, indicating that the formation is younger than ca. 1026 Ma minus the added extra time needed for later uplift, denudation, thrusting, erosion, and transport to southwestern Ohio. Thus, as judged by proximity, composition, thickness, and geochronology, it is a North American equivalent to other Neoproterozoic Grenvillian-derived basins, such as the Torridon Group of Scotland and the Palmeiral Formation of South America. An alternate possibility, although much less likely in our opinion, is that it could be much younger, any time between 1048 ± 22 Ma and the deposition of the Middle Cambrian Mount Simon Sandstone at about 510 Ma, and still virtually almost all derived from rocks of the Grenville Orogen.

Wernicke's Disease and Schizophrenia: A Case Report and Review of the Literature

Objectives: A review of the neuropathology literature in schizophrenia suggests that some patients with this disease exhibit periventricular gliosis at postmortem examination. Several researchers have speculated that this finding is the remnant of either a prior viral infection or a gestational intraventricular hemorrhage. The present article uses a case report to hypothesize and discuss an alternate possibility to the putative gliosis, namely Wernicke's disease. Method: Based on the pathological findings of our patient and a review of the literature, the author summarizes several reasons why Wernicke's disease may occur, and still be unnoticed, in some schizophrenic patients. Results: Inefficient self-care and homelessness predisposes some patients with schizophrenia to poor dietary habits and malnutrition. Similarly, the high prevalence of concurrent alcoholism in patients with schizophrenia may propitiate thiamine deficiency. The resulting brain insult may be compounded by disturbances of carbohydrate metabolism which may be peculiar to the schizophrenic process itself, or acquired, as in coincidental diabetes. Conclusions: Since symptoms accrued to Wernicke's may often be subtle and obscured by other schizophreniform manifestations, clinicians should lower their threshold for suspecting this potentially fatal complication. The diagnostic possibility of Wernicke's should be especially entertained in schizophrenic patients who are alcoholics and/or diabetics.

C-Microtubules in Isolated Mitotic Spindles

Microtubules with incomplete cylindrical structure are present in isolated mitotic spindles of the sea urchin, Arbacia punctulata. In cross-section they appear C-shaped, and are thus similar to the ‘C-microtubules’ or ‘C-filaments’ observed previously in other systems. The C-microtubules are not uniformly distributed within isolated spindles, but are typically numerous in the interzonal region of anaphase spindles and in the metaphase chromosome ‘plate’. In chromosome-to-pole regions they are seen much less frequently, and microtubules with the usual O-configuration predominate. Counts of C- and O-microtubules in anaphase spindle cross-sections of known location show an inverse relationship between the number of C-microtubules present and the total number of microtubules present. The observations suggest that the C-microtubules are not simple artifacts of fixation or isolation, but rather may represent a stage of microtubule disassembly which occurs in the interzone during isolation or during anaphase in vivo. The alternate possibility of assembly is not excluded, however. The significance of C-microtubules is further discussed with respect to their occurrence in other systems, and to potential differences between mitotic microtubules.